Curtain Up

by Julius Green

  LAWRENCE: Only three times, Sarah.

  DAME LAURA: Are you a mass poisoner, Mr Steene?

  SARAH: Oh no, he sheds them in the divorce courts.

  Not surprisingly, Sarah’s decision to marry Lawrence turns out disastrously, and at the end of the play neither mother nor daughter has succeeded in finding happiness. This is all about as far removed from a country house whodunit as it is possible to get, and yet it is very much in keeping with Christie’s preoccupations as a playwright and is a fine example of her abilities to explore serious subjects through the medium.

  Basil Dean had hoped to cast Gertrude Lawrence as Ann in 1939, and in 1951 there was some excitement when Saunders thought he might be able to interest distinguished classical stage actress Fay Compton, who had played Ophelia opposite both John Gielgud and John Barrymore; but in the end Cork reported that Compton ‘could not see herself in A Daughter’s a Daughter, and as Peter Saunders does not want to do it unless he can get absolutely the right casting, this matter has not moved much’.65 Cork’s own suggestion, Martita Hunt, best known as Miss Havisham in David Lean’s 1949 film of Great Expectations, was dismissed by Christie as ‘not at all right’; a ‘smart, sophisticated’ actress, she thought, but not a sufficiently ‘soft and sympathetic’ one.66

  After the Fay Compton setback, A Daughter’s a Daughter appears to have gone on to the back burner again until it suddenly appeared, reworked as a novel, in 1952; this makes it, incidentally, the only Christie novel to be based on a play, rather than the other way round. In publishing it, however, Christie opted to issue it as a work by Mary Westmacott, the pen name which she had adopted for a series of non-crime novels that, in her own theatrical terminology, might be described as ‘domestic dramas’. As Max Mallowan notes:

  Agatha’s success as a writer of detective fiction had one disadvantage, in that her publisher discouraged her if she ever expressed a desire to work in some other literary medium. No other writer of detection has written in that form for so long . . . Nevertheless the time came when Agatha insisted on release and began writing under the name Mary Westmacott . . . As Mary Westmacott, Agatha was able to embark on many themes in which she was interested. Music, drama, the psychology of ambition, the problems of artists . . . But I think that in this form of writing the true release came in that it gave her freedom to range over characters in depth, freed from the constriction of the detective plot to which every personality had to be subordinated.67

  The novelised A Daughter’s a Daughter starts with the earlier scenario of Sarah on a skiing holiday, indicating that as a piece of writing it pre-dates the changes made to the play; although Gerry (in this case with a ‘G’) is not, even jokingly, anti-semitic. This was the fifth Westmacott title and the second to be published by Heinemann, Collins having lost the franchise when they opted out of publishing 1947’s The Rose and the Yew Tree. In a piece written to mark her mother’s centenary, Rosalind commented:

  The Mary Westmacott books have been described as romantic novels but I don’t think it is really a fair assessment. They are not ‘love stories’ in the general sense of the term, and they certainly have no happy endings. They are, I believe, about love in some of its most powerful and destructive forms. The possessive love of a mother for her child, or a child for its mother in both Giant’s Bread (1930) and Unfinished Portrait (1944). The battle between the widowed mother and her grown-up daughter in A Daughter’s a Daughter. A girl’s obsession with her younger sister in The Burden and the closeness of love to hate – the Burden in this story being the weight of one person’s love on someone else.68

  In a Sunday Times interview in 1961, Agatha herself commented of the Westmacott novels that ‘I enjoy thinking of a detective story, planning it, but when it comes to write it, it is like going to work every day, like having a job. Writing detective stories is your job, and it is a job, but writing the others feels pleasant.’69 This is very similar to the way she compared her work on detective novels with the pleasure she derived from her playwriting, and biographer Laura Thompson, who devotes much of her book to exploring the thesis that the Westmacott novels provided a ‘door that opened into her most private and precious imaginative garden’, might have done well to pay equal attention to Christie’s plays, rather than dismissing them as ‘lightweight things on the whole’.

  In the Westmacott books Agatha takes refuge in her alter ego to explore some of the more painful themes of her own life, particularly in the second book, 1934’s Unfinished Portrait. Separating the work of ‘Westmacott’ from that written by ‘Agatha Christie’ ensured that, in so doing, the expectations of the latter’s readers were not subverted. In her work as a dramatist, however, where her words were effectively spoken by her characters rather than herself, she felt no need for such distancing. Agatha Christie, playwright, was free to explore whatever themes, subtexts and dramatic constructions she wished, and the result was that the stage sometimes became a battlefield between her aspirations as a writer and the expectations of her audiences and producers.

  Ironically, the one piece that could have conclusively defined Christie’s work as a playwright on her own terms had now been published as a novel under the Westmacott name, so when it was finally performed there was no option but to promote the stage version as a Westmacott work as well. This had plainly never been Christie’s intention, and even the revised early 1950s typescript states that A Daughter’s a Daughter is a play ‘by Agatha Christie’. Only when it was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office in 1956, four years after the novelisation, did the play become credited to Westmacott.70 The true identity of Westmacott had in fact been revealed in 1949, much to Christie’s distress, by the Sunday Times’ Atticus column which, appropriately enough, was written at that time by former secret agent Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. Readers of the novel are therefore likely to have been well aware of its true authorship, although Christie herself persisted with the pretence, issuing a sixth and final novel in the Westmacott name, The Burden, in 1956.

  In May 1955, Edmund Cork wrote to Christie to confirm that her tickets had been reserved for the Queen’s visit to Witness for the Prosecution at the Theatre Royal Windsor and with some updates about the proposed film of Spider’s Web for Margaret Lockwood. He also mentions that ‘The woman director who is so keen on A Daughter’s a Daughter is Chloe Gibson. I don’t know her work very well, but I understand she has come on wonderfully during the last year or so. Probably you know all about her, as she hails from Torquay.’71 Gibson, who was nine years younger than Christie and was indeed a native of Torquay, had started her career acting in rep at Paignton and had the distinction of having ‘discovered’ Dirk Bogarde when making her West End directorial debut in 1947, with Michael Clayton-Hutton’s play Power Without Glory. Gibson’s work was highly regarded and she went on to become head of drama at Irish television station RTE, but we know from correspondence relating to finding a director for The Hollow that, according to Saunders, ‘Miss Christie is not keen on Chloe Gibson.’72 Quite why this was we may never know – it may even have related to childhood and family matters in Torquay – but for whatever reason Gibson, who would have been an interesting choice, was not entrusted with the project.

  Having produced four consecutive Christie plays in the West End, and having firmly established her brand in the stage thriller market, Saunders was clearly at something of a loss as to what to do with A Daughter’s a Daughter. Eventually, though, he concocted a scheme that would get the play off his desk and on to a stage with a minimum of fuss or, indeed, of financial outlay.

  Amongst Saunders’ smaller investors was Ralph Wotherspoon, a former satirist for Punch magazine who was now a director of Smith and Whiley Productions, which presented repertory seasons under the management of Geoffrey Hastings. Himself an investor with Saunders, Hastings had worked alongside him on his early theatrical projects, and was regularly licensed by him to produce post-West End tours of Christie plays. Smith and Whiley had engaged Hastings to run rep
ertory seasons at the Theatre Royal Stratford East before the theatre was taken over by Joan Littlewoood’s Theatre Workshop in 1953, and by 1956 he was managing successful seasons for them at Newquay and at the Theatre Royal, Bath. Now Saunders turned to Wotherspoon and Hastings’ repertory company at Bath, the London Resident Company, to host the premiere of A Daughter’s a Daughter. The production was scheduled to run for a week and would be cast from within the local repertory players. It was a low-maintenance operation, not in itself designed for West End transfer, but it would at least get the play on its feet.

  The Bath Chronicle was well aware of the playwright’s identity, and in July 1956 ran an article which read:

  The London Resident Company are privileged to announce that they have been chosen to produce for the first time on any stage the new drama ‘A Daughter’s a Daughter’ by Mary Westmacott. The author is, of course, more widely known as Agatha Christie, the world famous novelist who also specialises in stage thrillers. When writing novels other than thrillers she uses the name Mary Westmacott. There is always something exciting about the production for the first time of a new play, particularly if its author is a popular figure, and the London Resident Company are grateful for the opportunity of participating on such an occasion. Agatha Christie and the London impresario Peter Saunders, who has exclusive rights on all Miss Christie’s stage productions, will be paying a visit to the Bath Theatre Royal one night during the week to see this, her latest work.73

  Strangely, for a local event of this importance (‘First time on any Stage’ trumpeted the Theatre Royal’s programme), the Bath Chronicle appears not to have run a review of the play, and this means that the review in The Stage newspaper, like that of Towards Zero in the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, is the only first-hand account that we have of the production. Unlike the Chronicle’s journalist, The Stage’s critic was either ignorant of, or chose not to reveal, the playwright’s true identity. The newspaper’s review, which ran under the headline ‘THE HATE THAT GROWS IN WOMEN’, oddly categorised the piece as a ‘domestic comedy’, perhaps as a result of local advertising, and went on to say:

  It has a nice workman-like plot and some unusual angles and has much to commend it. It is scarcely a comedy, although it contains much amusing dialogue. It portrays the hate that can grow in women who have made a sacrifice and can never forget the smell of its burning. A mother is about to marry again. Her teenage daughter greatly resents this and breaks off the marriage. From this time a happy home is disrupted. The mother takes to the gay life and the daughter marries a dissolute rich young man. Drink and drugs cloud the mind of both, despite the efforts of a kindly elderly relative. Audrey Noble plays the part of the mother with effect, and her duologues with her daughter are finely given. The daughter is played brilliantly by Mary Manson, a clever and attractive young actress.74

  The rest of the London Resident Company, led by their director Maurice Jones in the role of Ann’s suitor, Richard Cauldfield, are also praised by the reviewer. Playing Sarah’s hapless suitor Jerry was twenty-two-year-old Trevor Bannister, later to appear in the long-running television comedy Are You Being Served?

  Doubtless to Saunders’ relief, this was hardly the sort of response that was going to put pressure on him to put the play into the West End. And in any case, Christie herself was immediately distracted by rehearsals for Towards Zero. The truth was that Saunders wasn’t really the man for this particular job, and he probably knew it. If Basil Dean had produced A Daughter’s a Daughter back in 1939 with Gertrude Lawrence as Ann, it may well have been a sensation and sent Christie on an entirely different course as a playwright. Even if Saunders had produced the play when he himself first received it in the early 1950s, it might well have passed muster in a West End where Emlyn Williams explored middle-class flirtations with the seamier side of London life in 1951’s Accolade and, the following year, Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea presented audiences with Peggy Ashcroft as Hester Collyer, a female protagonist who has suffered severe emotional damage as a result of the choices she has made in her pursuit of love. Both these productions were presented, of course, by Tennents, in whose hands A Daughter’s a Daughter might well have been better positioned. For all they may have been accused of focusing their efforts on the work of gay men, Tennents produced a number of new plays by women writers, including Clemence Dane, Lesley Storm, Dodie Smith, Lillian Hellman and Daphne du Maurier; and two months before A Daughter’s a Daughter opened in Bath, they had presented the London premiere of Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, her first West End venture since Farndale had produced her debut play Lottie Dundas in 1943.

  Although twenty years her junior, Rattigan, like Christie, had come into his own as a playwright in the post-war West End. We know from ticket orders held by Cork that Christie attended Rattigan’s Separate Tables at the St James’s Theatre in 1954, possibly in this case to support its designer Michael Weight, who was about to design Spider’s Web; and there is every reason to believe that, as an avid theatregoer, she would have seen The Deep Blue Sea as well. When A Daughter’s a Daughter finally received its West End premiere in 2009, almost thirty-four years after Christie’s death, Daily Telegraph critic Charles Spencer wrote, ‘Christie’s clear-eyed, long-neglected account of the way the English middle-class can make their lives unutterably miserable can stand comparison with Rattigan at his best’;75 the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner noted that ‘Christie catches the uncertainty and desperation of a post-war Britain in rapid social change’, while observing, ‘It’s a clever fake that looks and sounds like a Rattigan play, but it never feels like the real thing.’76 In fact, of course, A Daughter’s a Daughter pre-dates the majority of Rattigan’s work, and the period of rapid social change which it addresses was originally a much earlier one. As a play, it is remarkably ahead of its time; the time, that is, when it was originally written. Developments in Theatreland in 1956, however, had conspired to make it seem immediately out of date.

  Two months before A Daughter’s a Daughter opened at Bath, the newly established English Stage Company at the Royal Court, a beneficiary of a recent expansion in the Arts Council’s funding remit, had presented their third production, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Osborne’s play, which was set in a small, squalid Midlands flat and featured the truly shocking sight of a woman ironing on stage, introduced audiences to Jimmy Porter, the prototype ‘angry young man’. It heralded a new wave of ‘realist’ playwriting and as such, if literary historians are to be believed, constituted a seminal moment in British theatre, arriving as it did less than a year after twenty-four-year-old director Peter Hall’s London premiere of the distinctly non-realist Waiting for Godot. The Observer’s Kenneth Tynan was to lead the charge for Look Back in Anger (his predecessor, Ivor Brown, hated it) and, given this, Tynan’s review of the notably substandard Towards Zero four months later was remarkably good-natured. As the normally unquotable Hubert Gregg puts it rather nicely, ‘Coward had been clipped by Pinter, Beckett had rubbed out Rattigan. White ties and tails had surrendered to no ties and sweatshirts. Technique gave place to the grunt, the graceful gesture to the scratch. A witty line lost out to an interminable pause . . . One thing was certain amidst the shifting sands . . . nobody, but nobody was going to spring The Mousetrap.’77

  The decades of delays in producing Christie’s Rattiganesque A Daughter’s a Daughter meant that it had, to all intents and purposes, missed the boat. With Jimmy Porter ranting and his wife Alison doing the ironing, Rattigan himself, like Coward after the war, suddenly found that he was yesterday’s man; not helped, of course, by his advocacy, in the 1953 second volume of his Collected Plays, of playwriting that would find favour with audiences whom he characterised as ‘Aunt Edna’ – a ‘nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged maiden lady’. Shaw had always challenged the ‘well-made plays’ of Rattigan, but now the ‘angry young men’ could have a field day promoting themselves as the antithesis to Aunt Edna.

  Coward reinvented his career in Ve
gas and Rattigan reinvented his in film, but Christie herself was not caught in the crossfire between Aunt Edna and Jimmy Porter. With Saunders as her producer she was categorised as a provider of populist entertainment rather than the sort of art that people actually bothered arguing about. She was part of neither the culture (as represented by Tennents) nor the counter-culture (as represented by the Royal Court), and while this means that she has effectively been written out of theatre history, had she kept her head down and focused on writing detective thrillers for the stage she might well have remained above the fray. But Agatha Christie, playwright, didn’t play by the rules.

  Whilst the Royal Court benefited from the new era of public subsidy for theatre, Tennents cleverly continued to create their own subsidy by operating a tax-exempt company alongside their commercial one. Peter Saunders, in analysing the failure of Woodrow Wyatt’s Theatrical Companies Bill, notes that ‘The Tory Government of the day did not see fit to give way to a Socialist’s plea on a matter like this. But the campaign for the Entertainment Tax’s abolition was mounting. Deputations went to the House of Commons. Normally reticent producing managers opened their accounts to show how they were suffering, and how unfair it all was.’78

  Amongst those raising their voices in protest was Frank G. Maddox, general manager of the Theatre Royal, Bath, who in 1956 wrote in the introduction to the programme for A Daughter’s a Daughter, ‘This will be a sad week and one of disappointment in the live theatre, for once again the Chancellor has refused the opportunity afforded him to put things right and abolish the Entertainment Tax. With a solemn promise that in the next budget he hopes that it will no longer be necessary for him to defend this imposition, and that he will look into the whole structure of the Entertainment Duty, he has again washed his hands of the theatre’s present plight.’79 He went on to note that eighty theatres had closed down in the UK in the previous two years, that London cabaret clubs were circumventing the tax by charging excessively for food and offering ‘free’ entertainment and that television was pulling stars away from live theatre.